Matthew Green

It's too bad, because private chat is such an inexpensive opportunity for a company like Google to finally get some good privacy PR.

Google just can't help themselves, no matter how many skilled privacy & security engineers they have on their payroll.

The privacy and security threat model at Google does not include Google. Ever.

Or law enforcement demanding data from Google.

@dinodaizovi I don't think that's what people want. People want their chat logs available when they need them.

Counterpoint: Snapchat?

yeah I agree there is a use case for Snapchat. Just not every chat.

I think people want the choice. Permanently storing and datamining chats doesn't give them that choice. Use Gmail.

data-mining is a different story for sure, and yes people definitely want that choice.

I don't know about you, but there are times I use email and times I don't. For this reason exactly.

(Well, typically my threat model is someone dumping my email, but same difference).

Chat has become our electronic replacement for telephony and f2f conversations. It *can't* work like email.

If people don't want to store their chat logs, why do most of them opt into backing up their chats and data in the cloud?

It's not an either/or. There's just nobody big competing in this market. Yet.

All popular messaging apps provide backups/cloud one way or another. The rest of them are not popular – for a reason.

I agree that if the choice is backups or privacy, people will pick backups. But there's no reason to choose.

@wbm312 People want those pointless bots.

How long until Google discontinues support for Allo?

I don’t care about Allo so much as the reasons people sometimes prefer insecure chat.

Supporting bots isn't quite the problem with Allo. It's the "storing all historical data forever to train on" part.

I mean, it may be that these hyper-trained bots are so much better that the service is a runaway success.

But I wouldn't want to bet money on it. I think people will be just fine with the existing dumb bots on other services.